Uncle Tom's Cabin
The members of Plymouth Church placed a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin in a time capsule buried beneath their new church in 1852. The book, published in 1852 in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act, vividly depicts the cruel nature of American slavery. It is credited with helping to fuel abolitionist sentiment in the country during the 1850s. Its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the sister of clergyman and fellow abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher.
Henry Ward Beecher is said to have suggested the name "Plymouth" for the new congregation formed by the parishioners who had left Cleveland's Old Stone Church in 1850. Beecher was pastor at Brooklyn, New York's Plymouth Church, which also served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.